


Too Much of a Good Thing

by Bekkoni



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Justice League, Justice League & Justice League Unlimited (Cartoons), Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, SuperBat, Superman Red/Superman Blue, Superman/Batman - Freeform, Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-11
Updated: 2014-10-11
Packaged: 2018-02-20 18:57:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2439305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bekkoni/pseuds/Bekkoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many things Bruce has gotten used to in his long career as a costumed vigilante. Having his boyfriend split into two separate beings is not one of them, unfortunately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Much of a Good Thing

A/N: This piece was inspired by [this wonderful art](http://haining-art.tumblr.com/post/98155387505/doodle-of-superman-red-superman-blue-batman-i) from Tumblr by [Hai-ning](http://haining-art.tumblr.com). I changed a little from the comics canon Red/Blue storyline, but hopefully for the better :)

 

****#****

 

Clark had been missing for three days. This was not, in of itself, worrying, since the life of a superhero often involved getting dragged without one’s consent to distant planets or being shunted off into a dreamworld with no explanation. The Justice League had been de-aged, shrunk, turned into animals, and pulled into alternate universes just in the last year alone. Bruce himself had just gotten back from a rather unpleasant trek across Mars after somehow upsetting Bat-Mite.

So no, he wasn’t worried about Clark. At least not _that_ worried. Or he wouldn’t have been, had Clark not had his powers disrupted so recently. They didn’t even know the range of his electrical powers yet or how they worked, and off he’d gone to battle that crazed cyborg imposter.

Bruce flipped through the footage of the fight frame-by-frame. One second, there was Clark in his new blue suit (Bruce thought it gauche, but what could you expect out of something that Luthor had a hand in?) and the next second, a burst of light. When the screen cleared, the cyborg was lying on the ground dazed and Clark was nowhere to be seen.

He went back and watched it again. In the explosion, in between the debris and the smoke, he thought he saw a glimpse of the blue suit and a flash of red. But that could just be his imagination, filling in the gaps he wanted. When he’d tried paging Clark’s comlink, all he’d gotten was a burst of static. The electrical powers maybe, messing with the signal.  But he couldn’t be sure.

“Sir?” Alfred appeared at the top of the stairs, barely peeking through the entrance to the Cave, as if there was someone who he couldn’t let see inside. “You have an— _ah_ —some visitors. Or, well, a visitor maybe.”

“Which is it?” Bruce asked. Alfred looked visibly confused, which was not something that happened often. He kept glancing behind him, as if he wasn’t sure of whoever it was waiting, but surely he would have given a signal if there was any danger.

“I’m truly not sure,” Alfred said, and opened the door wider.

Clark came tromping down the stairs, and Bruce tried not to appear too visibly relieved.

“There you are,” he said. Clark didn’t look injured, but Bruce was willing to forgo demanding an explanation for his absence. “Did you get knocked into space or something? You were gone for—”

Then the second Clark came in, this one wearing a mirror of the blue one’s costume, just in red.

“There were some complications,” Blue said. “As you can see.”

“It sucked,” added Red.

To his credit, it only took Bruce a second to regain his composure. “This is something even for you, Clark. Got tired of just being able to zap people with your new electric touch?”

Neither of the Supermen looked amused, but then Bruce’s sense of humor was perhaps a bit rusty.

Bruce turned back to the computer bank, and discreetly pushed the button that would set off a medical scan of all the Cave’s occupants. He didn’t truly expect it turn up much. Clark’s biology had always something of a map made up of blank spaces, even before all of this electromagnetic nonsense. What Kryptonian files they had were incomplete and made for the people of a red sun, not one collecting superpowers off of yellow light. “So how do we turn you back?”

“I—we—don’t know,” Blue said. He shifted away from Red with a hint of a glare. Bruce wondered what was up with that, but decided that not all questions needed to be asked at a time like this. “That’s why we left. We went to the Fortress and ran tests, but nothing seems to be working. We’re not a danger, at least.”

Red yawned. Blue glared. Bruce, increasingly, was confused.

“Can you still turn off your powers and lose the suit?”

“Haven’t tried.” Red poked at the keyboard like he was bored of standing still already.

“Theoretically we can.” Blue leaned over Bruce’s other shoulder, taking in every detail of the medical scan with sharp eyes. “I don’t know how we would look, though. As you can tell, we are not the same person.”

“I’ve noticed.” He’d tried not to. The electric-blue debacle was enough of a change, although thankfully it had forced Clark to lose the atrocious mullet. After their last battle together, he’d leaned in to kiss Clark, and promptly fallen straight through his newly-incorporeal boyfriend. Clark had laughed himself silly; Bruce did not find it nearly as amusing. “Let’s get you back to normal. There’s got to be a way.”

“I’ve tried everything I can think of. X-rays, gamma radiation, even some different varieties of kryptonite.” Blue touched his nose, like he was pushing up imaginary glasses, and then remembered himself and pointed to the computer screen. “Those readings are the same as when we split. No change.”

“We really only came here ‘cause we missed you,” Red said, with a predatory grin that was frankly shocking on Clark’s face.

Bruce peered at him, and the grin widened. Blue frowned so deeply that Bruce thought his face was going to cave in on itself. He couldn’t decide which of them he liked less, the humorless Blue or the annoying Red.

“This is serious, and you should act like it,” snapped Blue. Red just laughed. “Yeah, like this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Why don’t we go out and punch some supervillains before they get wind of there being two of us?”

“No one is punching anyone,” Bruce said, before Blue could get snarly again. Thank god Tim and Dick weren’t home. He knew he’d never hear the end of the jokes. The medical scans weren’t turning up anything he didn’t already know. He’d never thought to install a machine that could analyze the health of a being made entirely of electricity. There were a lot of things about this career that he’d never thought he’d have to do, really. He got up and went to the evidence locker. Maybe one of the crazier supervillains’ inventions could fix this. Heck, he’d had to use Mr. Freeze’s ice bombs to solidify the river once. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of any evil schemes he’d thwarted that had involved dispersing vast amounts of electricity.

“I’m sure we could find some way to have fun.” Suddenly Red was behind him. Bruce almost dropped the canister of Joker venom he was holding, but managed to get it back in the drawer before Red wrapped an arm around his waist. Sometimes, he forgot how very tall and… _solid_ Clark was.

So, he’d found a way to make himself corporeal again. Bruce opened his mouth to comment on this interesting fact when a jolt of electricity ran down the length of his body and he lost all rational thought.

“Thought you’d like that.” Red’s mouth was now right next to his ear.

Bruce looked at Blue, who was now sitting backwards on Bruce’s chair with his head resting on the seat back. He was staring at the scene of Red wrapped around Bruce with something like a mix of interest, longing, and reluctance.

“I did miss you,” he said. “Did you notice that I finally figured out how to make ourselves solid again?” Then, equally as inexplicably, he too was next to Bruce. “And how to contain the energy without the suits, if we don’t use our powers.”

“Oh,” Bruce said, as he still hadn’t quite gotten full use of his cognitive faculties back, and the feel of Red’s breath dangerously close to his neck was not helping. _Turning Batman into a ninny_ ought to have been on Clark’s official list of powers, if he were being honest with himself about how often this happened. And they _had_ been apart a long time, which made it worse.

Red skimmed his hand down Bruce’s side, undoing all the carefully hidden closures that held the armor plates together with a deftness that only came from practice. Bruce froze at Red’s touch on his bare skin. His fingers tingled with an electricity Bruce still wasn’t used to.

“This isn’t too weird, is it?” Blue asked. It didn’t help Bruce’s verbal skills that he was asked this while Blue was half-draped across his shoulder.

_Oh, it’s very weird_ , Bruce thought, but found that the weirdness actually mattered very little to him. It seemed time did make the heart grow fonder, fond enough even to get him to ignore his more rational self. “When has any of this not been weird?” Blue chuckled and the break in his solemn look made Bruce feel just a little bit more like this really was his Clark, or at least part of his Clark.

“Good,” Blue said, and kissed him. Red had undone the snaps that held the cowl onto the suit and Bruce let it fall. He knew that Alfred would end up picking up the disarray later, probably with a lot of very pointed sighs. But frankly, he couldn’t quite bring himself to care about Alfred’s disapproval. Red’s mouth worked its way down his side as he peeled off the suit inch by inch, over old scars and each of Bruce’s ribs.

“You’re beautiful,” Red breathed, and picked him up like he was nothing. Bruce found himself bent backwards over the evidence table with Red undoing the zipper on his pants and Blue pressing kisses along his collarbone.

Then Blue paused and pulled away from Bruce, as if he were listening to something.

“What is it?” Bruce asked, and reached out to pull him back without thinking about it. It was a good thing that Dick and Tim were taking patrol tonight, since this mental state was not one he wanted to fight in.

_Dick and Tim_ …oh. Had he locked the door to the Cave?

“Your kids are coming,” Blue whispered, confirming Bruce’s suspicions. “Should we find somewhere more suitable?”

 *****#*****

Bruce woke up in bed somewhere around three in the morning, with only a vague recollection what the heck had happened the night before. Then he felt the bodies on either side of him, and remembered. Blue was curled up on his right, his head resting on Bruce’s shoulder and his arm over his waist, while Red was stretched out at Bruce’s left with one arm around his shoulders almost protectively.

Bruce looked at the door, and considered trying to extricate himself from the tangle of limbs so he could go try and figure out how to solve Clark’s predicament.

Blue shifted and opened his eyes halfway. “Don’t go,” he said. “It’s not even morning and you never sleep.”

Bruce considered the door again, but Blue pulled the blankets back over them both and he decided that bed really was a nice place after all 

When he woke up again, Alfred was knocking on the door. Quite frantically, in fact, or at least as frantically as an upstanding British gentleman allowed himself to. Bruce groaned at the sunlight piercing through the drapes and pulled himself full enough out of sleep to call, “What is it!”

"Good morning, master Bruce,” Alfred said, because he couldn’t help himself, even when there were really more urgent matters to attend to. “Your guest, er, guests—”

“—definitely the plural.” Bruce leaned over and tried to read the clock through the morning blur in his vision. Could it really be seven already?

“Either way, they’ve put a robot through the Wayne Enterprises building.”

“They _what_?” Bruce leapt out of bed and ran to the window. Sure enough, he could just make out a giant metallic arm sticking out of the Wayne Enterprises spire. “How? When? _What_?”

“No one was inside at the time, except for a few maintenance staff safely on the lower levels. Apparently, Toyman decided to try a career in giant robots, and your guests decided to stop him themselves rather than wake you. The red one chose to throw it into the building.” Alfred sighed in a way that clearly said _I told you so_. “Dick and Tim mitigated the damage and corralled your guests downstairs.”

Bruce yanked the bathrobe out of his closet and stomped down the three flights of stairs into the Cave. Red and Blue were sitting on the evidence table that Bruce had been bent over hours before, with a very unhappy-looking Nightwing and Robin in front of them.

“What,” Bruce growled, “Were you thinking.”

“I stopped him,” Red said. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about. One punch.”

“It’s _Toyman_! He puts giant switches on the backs of his robots! You could have just turned it off!”

“I tried to tell him that.” Blue looked annoyed as well, like he was the one wronged here. “I’d have done it, but I really prefer to not get my hands dirty.”

“Punching it seemed easier.” Red shrugged.

“You can’t just punch problems.” Bruce tried not to think about how many times Clark had said something similar to him.

“Why not?” Red sounded petulant. That was what did it.

“Stop,” Bruce said. “Just stop. You cannot fight like this. You cannot make decision like this. Absolutely none of this is working. The both of you are going to go to the Fortress and stay there until we figure out a solution.”

“But—” Blue began.

“ _No_.” Bruce put on the snarl that made criminals piss themselves. “You will do as I say.”

Red and Blue stood up, in unison, both wearing expressions like kicked puppies. Alfred showed them the door. Once they were gone, Bruce groaned and slumped against the computer bay. Of all the things that could happen in his life, of course his boyfriend had to go and split into two separate beings. Would one easy day be two much to ask? And now he had to go and figure out what random, particular, and of course unlikely circumstance would put Clark back together.

In the midst of his brooding, Nightwing sidled up next to him, grinning, and elbowed him in the side. “Sooo…they both stayed over last night?”

Tim started chuckling behind his hands.

“Oh both of you, shut up.”

Tim shook his head. “ _My_ boyfriend didn’t punch a robot into our company.”

“I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I?” Bruce asked.

“Nope,” Dick confirmed. “Absolutely never.”

 

 

***** _End_ *****


End file.
